Right vs. Good: Justice, Freedom, and Self-Knowledge
Right vs. Good: Several Contrasts
Several contrasts between the right and the good:
First difference: Principles of justice are chosen in the original position; principles of rational choice are not chosen at all. Since everyone is free to act according to his own conception, there is no need to choose them. Rawls supports a thin theory of the good.
Second difference: Goods can be different for different individuals (different aims, life-plans, preferences according to talents and so on), rights are not.
Third difference: Conceptions of the good can’t be formed under the condition of the veil of ignorance, because they depend on capacities, social position, etc. Also, the principle of rational choice suffers an indetermination; they can vary in time according to circumstances and personal inclination, etc.
Status of the Good
If values are not objective, then they have the same validity as changing desires and wants, leading to a reduction of the idea of good to individual will. For Rawls, what “resists” this change is justice (Archimedean point). Conception of good is not relevant from a moral point of view and depends on circumstances. Rawls is similar to Utilitarians, only limited by a certain concept of right. Kantian private morality is similar to utilitarianism, everyone pursues his own good. Rawls just disagrees with respect to the way in which this individual search spreads through society. Rawls’ critique to utilitarianism is the “conflation of all persons (desires) in one.” But if a system of desire has no order in itself, then it is also indifferent whether it belongs to one person or more. The tendency to conflate desires reflects the failure to order them. (161)
The Moral Epistemology of Justice
Justice as a remedial virtue in Hume. But differently from Hume, justice is not caused by unavoidable egoism in subjects. Justice is something “outside” of the subject, just as a “regulative virtue,” because the subject is almost an empty subject, prior to his feelings and ends, a mere rational subject, realized when he follows something so impersonal like justice conceived in this way.
Where for Hume, we need justice because we do not love each other well enough, for Rawls we need justice because we cannot know each other well enough for even love to serve alone. This is more an epistemological limit than a moral one. We cannot know the others and their good, because this is completely subjective. So, it remains justice. For Rawls, there just exists a direct self-knowledge of our immediate desires. But this is also wrong: we are embedded in a social situation, and our aims are not understandable outside of this wider circumstance which is the common reality.
Character, Self-Knowledge, Friendship
What about identity, and a self capable of deliberating about his ends? Not being attached to my commitments means a self without identity and moral depth. I actually decide and take distance or come closer to what and who I recognize as valuable and not. If constitutive attachments seem at first an obstacle to free agency, a self without fixity doesn’t even know on the base of what to decide this or that.
Same problem with friendship. Also, dualism between private and public. As private I have eventually a character etc, in public just justice must prevail.
Positive Freedom
Concerns the source of power. At a subjective level, the power of action, to be my own master, a rational conscious agent. This would be the dominant self, often identified with the autonomous self, the reason – against my irrational impulses, lower nature, empirical or heteronomous self.
The organic metaphor used in romanticism, idealism, formed the nationalistic ideals. This can be a strategy to use power in a way that you assume that you are helping the real, occulted self of people.
This is why liberalism is against paternalism. Positive freedom divides man. And this led to depersonalization in order to attain external goals, and repression to my lower nature.
Liberty and Sovereignty
French Revolution: sovereignty of the people can destroy negative freedom. Mill: tyranny of the prevailing feeling and opinions. Tocqueville: tyranny of the majority. ‘It is not the arm that is unjust’, he wrote, ‘but the weapon that is too heavy – some weights are too heavy for the human hand.’: too much political freedom at cost of what? Democracy can still be dangerous. Popular government is a spasmodic government. (Rousseau – by giving myself to all I give myself to none). That’s why these limits are fundamental, God, or natural law, or rights and so on – being they an apriori or my ultimate ends. Tocqueville, Constant and so on had clear that no power but just rights can be regarded as absolute. There is a natural inviolability of human people, that can’t be abrogated by any formal procedure. Freedom of a society depends on the freedom of this boundaries.
The One and the Many
Believe in fulfillment as the realization of a human ideal, from Plato to Hegel and Marx. But in reality we always face different values that are all “ultimate”.
This is in some way an ideal of self-perfection, criticized by the liberals. They critique this perfectionism.
The faith in a single criterion has always been a source of unsatisfaction. Pluralism is a more human ideal.